


They Weren't Given A Grave

by Pargoletta



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Execution, F/M, Homophobia, Kidnapping, Lethal Injection, M/M, Needles, POV Antagonist, Prison, Racism, Sexism, Temporary Character Death, Torture, electric chair, firing squad - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-25 11:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30088467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pargoletta/pseuds/Pargoletta
Summary: Dan Wilcox is a prison administrator with two urgent problems on his hand.  At a conference in Switzerland, he meets Dr. Meta Kozak of Merrick Pharmaceuticals, who offers a frankly miraculous solution to both of his problems.  But Dan does not quite understand that miracles come with a price.  And the price for three immortal bodies is higher than he could ever imagine.
Relationships: Dr. Meta Kozak/OMC, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 24
Kudos: 25





	1. People You Meet Every Day

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, and welcome to this story! Fair warning at the start: This isn’t necessarily a nice story. It’s about bad people who do bad things, and what becomes of them as a result of doing those bad things. It came from a part of my mind where lots of things stewed together. Months of news about people in power doing cruel things just because they can, the lingering echoes of a job I had many years ago, a little Hannah Arendt, a little Terry Pratchett. There’s darkness here, but possibly some hope and kindness as well.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy the read, and I will see you at the end!

  1. **People You Meet Every Day**



“That’s all of our time,” the panel moderator said cheerfully. “Thank you for coming. Our panelists will be available for more conversations at the reception downstairs in the Blue Ballroom, beginning in five minutes. One more round of applause!”

Dan Wilcox applauded with the rest of the audience. He had to assume that almost everyone else in the room had actually understood what the presentation was about – the blonde sitting to his left had a notepad covered with tiny scribbles – and perhaps one of them might be kind enough to explain it to him. If he could even understand the explanation. He was half convinced that most of these eggheads were just making up words on the spot – was a “biogeneticist” even a real thing, anyway? He was fully convinced that his boss had wasted quite a bit of state money sending him to this conference, but then, it was a free trip to Switzerland. He’d be a fool to turn that down.

“Excuse me,” the blonde said. “Will you be going to the reception?”

Dan got up from his seat to let the blonde pass. She was smallish and slender, without much in the way of tits or ass. Her nametag identified her as Dr. Meta Kozak of Merrick Pharmaceuticals. Dan was immediately interested. Merrick Pharmaceuticals had been one of the last European companies to agree to supply his employer, but the company had experienced a sudden and completely unexplained disruption several years earlier. It might be worth talking to Dr. Kozak after all.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll go to the reception. You think they’ll have an open bar?”

“Of course,” Dr. Kozak said. “Do you know where the Blue Ballroom is? I’m rubbish at directions, and the map in the conference booklet isn’t helpful.”

“Sure I know where it is.” One of the things that Dan did have going for him was an excellent sense of direction, and he’d spotted the Blue Ballroom near the registration area on the first day.

“Good. I’ll walk with you.” Dr. Kozak fell into step with Dan.

“A pleasure. Doctor . . .” Dan suddenly realized that he wasn’t sure how to pronounce her name. “Kosick?” he ventured.

She smiled. “Kozak. And you are Dr. Daniel Wilcox, of . . .” She squinted a little, trying to get a glimpse of Dan’s nametag.

“Not a doctor, or anything smart like that,” Dan said. “I’m with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. And I’m especially glad to meet you.”

“Oh? I’m intrigued. You must tell me more at the reception.”

Dan led Dr. Kozak down one level and through a series of corridors, and they entered the Blue Ballroom. It didn’t look especially blue, nor did it look appreciably different from any of the hotel’s other ballrooms, but the reception was already in full swing inside. Dan and Dr. Kozak made their way to the bar where Dr. Kozak ordered white wine and Dan got a Heineken. They found an unoccupied table in a corner of the ballroom and placed their drinks on it. A waiter hurried to their side and offered a tray with stuffed mushroom caps. Dan helped himself to two, which he popped into his mouth as Dr. Kozak arranged her bag between her feet.

“So,” she said. “The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has sent a representative to a biogenetics conference. Have we committed a crime?”

Dan smiled. “I hope not. And it’d be out of my jurisdiction if you did. I work in the Administrative Review division. Right now, we’re revising our protocols for administering the death penalty.”

He paused. He’d had conversations about this aspect of his job with Europeans before. This was the moment when he often saw an expression of distaste flit across someone’s face, and he would have to explain that the death penalty was legal in the state of Texas, and that it wasn’t his job to weigh in on whether it was moral or not. But Dr. Kozak’s expression didn’t change. She looked as interested as ever.

“I see,” she said. “The United States uses lethal injection, does it not?”

Dan shrugged. “Texas does. I think the Feds do. Don’t really know about the other states.”

Dr. Kozak nodded. “That does at least partly explain why you’re here. What are you hoping to learn?”

“Well, first of all, I’m glad to meet you, because my boss was hoping to learn what happened over at Merrick Pharmaceuticals. We used to order our Pentobarbital from you, and then the company just stopped communicating with us. Usually when a drug company decides to stop supplying execution drugs, they send a little nastygram about it. But we never heard anything from Merrick.”

“My apologies.” Dr. Kozak sipped her wine. “There was a bit of an incident with one of the early-phase research projects. And Mr. Merrick died in an assault on the company HQ, and we’ve been reorganizing. I’ve been appointed chief vice president of the R and D division.”

“Er . . . congratulations.” Dan tipped his beer at her, though he was sure that his surprise over the murder of the company’s CEO showed on his face. But Dr. Kozak carried on as if pharmaceutical company bosses were whacked every second Tuesday.

“Do you need us to renew the contract for the Pentobarbital? That shouldn’t be difficult. I can get someone on the phone now.” Dr. Kozak bent down and reached for her handbag.

Dan held up his hand to stop her. “That’s nice of you to offer, thanks. But that’s actually more to the second reason I’m here.”

“Yes?”

Dr. Kozak’s eyes were locked on Dan’s face, and he felt himself begin to blush. It shouldn’t be this hard to tell her, not really, but he was suddenly very aware that he was in a ballroom full of European biogeneticists who were probably all too delicate to appreciate the value of the death penalty, and all too eager to cut their eyes at him in a judgy way. He didn’t need these nerves, not when he had just happened to run into exactly the person he needed to talk to. And it might have been the beer, but Dr. Kozak was a much more attractive woman than he had originally assumed.

“Maybe not here,” he said. “Do you . . . wanna grab dinner or something? There’s gotta be a good steakhouse around here or something like that.”

Dr. Kozak smiled and downed the rest of her wine. “I’d love that, Mr. Wilcox.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “Call me Dan.”

“Then you must call me Meta.”

The restaurant that Meta found for them wasn’t quite a steakhouse, but it did serve an excellent pork chop with sauerkraut and potatoes. Meta ordered some kind of chicken stew and red wine to go with it, which surprised Dan – he’d heard somewhere that you were supposed to drink white wine with chicken – but she also suggested a beer for him that was wildly better than the Heineken he’d had at the conference hotel. The restaurant was fancy, with candles and tablecloths, and what Dan’s wife Karen would probably have called “ambience.” It didn’t seem right to talk about the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in a fancy restaurant like that, so Dan asked Meta about her work with Merrick Pharmaceuticals instead.

She told him about several different projects she had worked on, and Dan figured that he understood at best a third of what she was talking about. But Meta didn’t seem to mind, and Dan even worked up the courage to ask her to explain the presentation they had both attended. By the time the waiter cleared their plates, they were talking about the similarities between Meta’s childhood in Romania under the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu and Dan’s memories of growing up in the Oklahoma panhandle.

Meta’s eyes sparkled in the candlelight, and she laughed as she told Dan about how she had had her first boyfriend at fifteen, and had regularly had to sneak out to meet him behind her mother’s back. She seemed even more animated when she talked about the boy she had dated in university, with whom she seemed to have had quite the adventurous sex life. Her favorite thing to do with this boyfriend was something that made Dan’s throat close up with a surge of lust; Karen had never even allowed him to think about asking for it, claiming it was something no good Christian woman should ever do.

The waiter returned to the table. “Would Sir and Madame like to see our dessert menu?”

Meta blatantly looked Dan up and down. “No, thank you,” she said. “Just the bill. We’ll take our dessert elsewhere, I think.”

Dan saw no reason to object. Away from the academic air of the conference, Meta seemed to have transformed into a beautiful woman. And she was a beautiful woman who knew exactly what she wanted. And Karen was far away in Texas, and there was no reason that she would ever have to know.

They ended up in Meta’s hotel room with little discussion about the matter. “I will be picky about my clothes,” Meta said. “A man may repeat a suit, but a woman must wear a different color blouse, or people will talk.”

Dan nodded indifferently. The only thing about Meta’s blouse that interested him at the moment was how soon it could be on the floor. And, as it happened, Meta had _ideas_ about that as well. It took much longer for the blouse to go away than Dan had hoped. But Meta held every bit of his attention from the moment that she smoothly divested him of his sport coat and draped it carefully over a chair, her ass on display with every move, to the moment when she finally laid him out on the bed, naked as the day he was born, and leaned down to show him what she had done with her university boyfriend.

Afterwards, Meta disappeared into the bathroom while Dan caught his breath on the bed. He wasn’t exactly a young man any more, and it was probably just as well that he would return to Texas and Karen, and Meta would return to London and the R and D division of Merrick Pharmaceuticals. Nevertheless, he wanted to remember this evening for a long time.

Meta emerged from the bathroom wrapped in the hotel’s plush bathrobe. She paused by the telephone. “Shall I order champagne?” she asked.

“Nah. I never did care much for champagne,” Dan said. “I’d rather have you back in the bed.”

Meta obliged, curling up next to Dan and arranging himself so that he had unfettered access to her tits. His hand moved almost of its own accord, jiggling and tweaking and petting. Meta smiled. “So,” she said. “We never did finish our conversation.”

“Hm?”

“The second reason you’re here. You wanted to find out what happened at Merrick Pharmaceuticals, and I told you that. But what is the second reason you’re here?”

Dan’s hand slowed down. It didn’t seem right to be talking about this while pinching someone’s nipple. Instead, he moved his hand down to Meta’s hip and stroked his thumb along the soft skin of her belly while he spoke.

“The Legislature just handed down some new regulations,” he said. “The reason I didn’t want to renew the Pentobarbital order right away is that we might not be able to use it much longer. New regulations for execution drugs say we have to find a new cocktail that’s fast, painless, and that any idiot can administer. Which ain’t easy, because we don’t get a whole lot of offenders able to give us a review afterwards, you know?”

“No, I suppose not.” Meta gave a wry smile.

“So my boss managed to come up with some extra cash and decided to send me off to this drug conference to see if I could come up with anything – or anyone – who could help us out with this little problem. Don’t see why, especially since most people here just sneer at me as soon as they hear that I work for Death Row.”

Meta shrugged. “Many of us in Europe are sensitive to such things.”

“You don’t seem bothered by it,” Dan observed.

“Not particularly. My work is largely in extending life, but the line between that and extinguishing life is thin.” Meta flopped back in Dan’s arms. “It is a shame you did not come to me earlier. I would have had such a resource for you.”

Dan was so surprised that he stopped petting Meta’s belly for a moment. “Merrick was actually working on new execution drugs?”

Meta laughed. “Oh, no. I had something even better within my grasp. I wouldn’t be able to tell you outside, in the conference. But here, just between the two of us . . .” She caught Dan’s hand and sucked on his index finger just enough to be sure that she had his full attention.

“What did you have?”

Meta’s eyes were huge and dark. “Would you believe me if I told you that I had in my control four – no, three. Wait. Yes. Four people whom death could not touch? Four immortal bodies that absorbed every wound, every poison, every insult that could be inflicted upon them, only to heal as pristine as if nothing had ever happened.”

“No way,” Dan breathed.

“I did not believe it myself,” Meta said. “And then I was permitted to experiment. I have seen it, touched it. You say that none of your offenders has ever been able to describe to you what it is like to be executed by injection, but these four bodies could do that. If your Legislature wants the perfect cocktail that will send the guilty off in peace and silence, they could help you find it.”

Dan lay back on the pillows and tried to absorb what he had just heard. “That’s amazing,” he said. “You have to put me in touch with them. If my boss could convince them to –“

“But he won’t,” Meta said sadly. “Do you remember the assault I spoke of, the one that killed Stephen Merrick?”

“Yeah.”

“They escaped. Directly, boldly, and leaving behind quite the mess.”

Well, that explained quite a bit, now that Dan thought about it. He wondered how he would even begin to explain to his boss what he had learned at this conference. “What happened to them?” he asked.

Meta shrugged. “I have been trying to determine that for the past few years,” she said. “They vanished without a trace, which is much harder to do than you might expect. The time that I do not spend on my work, I spend on trying to find these valuable people.”

“Have you come up with anything?”

“One of them has vanished entirely,” Meta said, “which is a shame, because, of all of them, he was the most amenable to our project. Another, I believe, lives somewhere in America. A Black woman. I . . . encountered her only briefly and violently, and I could not tell you much about her. The final two ought to be easier to find than they are. An Italian man and an Arab man, lovers who refuse to be separated. With the world as it is today, I would expect to have heard of their whereabouts, but they are clever, and they are not to be found.”

An idea floated into Dan’s head. “These folks – they killed Stephen Merrick?”

“And most of his personal protection squad as well.”

Dan nodded. “And you mentioned an American, an Italian, and an Arab, right?”

“The other was French. But he has vanished completely.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Dan sat up, reached for the nightstand, and grabbed the pen and pad of branded paper that the hotel provided. He began to scribble down notes. “Merrick Pharmaceuticals is based in London. That makes it a transnational thing. And there’s an American involved. Perfect.”

He wrote down a name and a telephone number on a second sheet of hotel notepaper and handed it to Meta. “This is Kenny Shelton. He’s a pal of mine, works at the Texas Criminal Investigations Department. They do things like track international crime. This group of people murdered Stephen Merrick, and that disrupted Texas state business. We get Kenny on the job, and he can track these folks down.”

Meta smiled. “You know many clever people,” she said. “I am pleased to be one of them. Perhaps you should be pleased as well.”

She ran her hand down his belly to his groin, and Dan discovered that, despite his advancing age, the right kind of spark could still ignite a fire.

The rest of the conference was relatively uneventful. Dan spent another night in Meta’s room, and he also went ahead and renewed the state’s order for Pentobarbital. They might not be able to use it for much longer, but at least they would have it on hand until then. He also took down Meta’s contact information. Whether or not her wild theory about functionally immortal assassins was anywhere close to reality, he could at least tell his boss that the head of R and D at Merrick Pharmaceuticals would be willing to work with the state of Texas to develop new lethal injection drugs that would meet whatever new standards the Legislature decided to impose upon them.

On his last day in Switzerland, Dan decided to get some souvenirs to bring back to his family. The cuckoo clocks he spotted in one shop window looked like something that Karen might enjoy, but he had no idea how he would pack one to get it home safely, so he bought a nice music box instead, one that played “Edelweiss.” He decided that, at sixteen, his son Noah was old enough to have a grownup watch, so he sprang for a nice one, reasoning that it could also be Noah’s Christmas present. When it came to fourteen-year-old Ashley, he panicked a little bit. Ashley was far too old for the cute little Heidi dolls and wooden dollhouse sets at the toy store, and Dan didn't think chocolate would go over well with a girl who bewailed even the slightest hint of a pimple on her forehead. In the end, he bought a cowbell, hoping that Ashley would appreciate something to decorate her room that wasn’t posters of One Direction and that strange Korean boy band with a name that sounded like it ought to belong to a serial killer.

On the flight home, Dan drank surprisingly good beer and reviewed his notes from the conference. Even without Meta’s immortal people, there was enough there that his boss would be pleased with the trip, and perhaps enough that he could convince his boss to invite Meta to Texas to consult with the Department about drug development. But the real sticking point for Dan was the question of how to present the idea of people who could die and come back and report on the experience to his boss. Even now, on a plane headed back home, it seemed like a crazy, fantastic idea, the sort that burbled up late at night after too much alcohol and rich food and a good orgasm or two.

But Dan couldn’t shake the thought that there was more to it than that. He’d had plenty of sit-downs with offenders over his career, and he flattered himself that he could tell when they were telling the truth and when they were puffing for whatever credit they thought he could give them. And Meta’s story had just enough detail in it that Dan couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. The Black woman and the gay men – she’d even been careful to note that one of them was Italian and one was Arab. Those weren’t the kind of details that people made up on the fly, and Dan was honest enough to admit to himself that they weren’t the kind of people he would have liked to hear about.

He tossed back the last of his beer and reclined his seat as far as it would go. He definitely needed to rest his eyes a little bit while he thought more about this. His last thought as he drifted off to sleep was that he really did want to see Meta again.


	2. How They Might Behave

  1. **How They Might Behave**



The first few days after his trip to Switzerland, Dan walked around both home and work in a bit of a daze. His family had seemed pleased with their gifts – well, Ashley had looked a bit confused when she held up the cowbell, and Karen had opened the music box, given it a tiny smile, and placed it on the highest shelf of the whatnot. But Noah’s solemn face when he opened the box that contained his watch at least gave Dan hope that he might be getting ready to grow up and turn into a man. And his personal assistant appreciated the box of chocolates he’d bought her at the airport, and which he gave to her without the pat on the ass she so richly deserved.

His boss, Pete Francis, was pleased to hear that the Pentobarbital order had been renewed. “Merrick’s always did make the good stuff. Shipped it efficiently, too,” he said. “Shame about the big guy, though. Do you know what happened to him?”

Dan shrugged. “At least a bit. I’ll tell you later, though.”

“Of course. And the other thing?”

Dan handed Pete a folder containing bits of information about Meta Kozak that he had pulled off the Web earlier that morning. “This is Dr. Meta Kozak, the head of R and D over at Merrick these days. She has a refreshingly open mind about capital punishment, and she’s willing to work with us on new drugs if we need them.”

Pete flipped through the folder. “Great. I’ll keep her in mind. The Legislature’s having a hearing over in Austin tonight, as it happens. Depending on how things go, we may be giving her a call sometime soon. Anything else happen while you were over there?”

“Dr. Kozak and I went out to dinner,” Dan said. He took a deep breath and forced himself to skip ahead a bit. “And we were talking. And she told me something that sounded so bizarre, it just couldn’t be real, but, see, the thing is . . . the way she told it, the more I think about the way she said it . . . I think it might just be real. And it could be exactly the thing we need in this department. Especially if the Legislature does something that we don’t like.”

Pete laughed. “Well, shit, Dan. Now you’ve got me all intrigued. What’d she say?”

Dan rubbed his palms on his pant legs, and got up to close the door to Pete’s office. Pete raised an eyebrow at that. He’d gone to great pains to assure everyone in the department that he was a “my door is always open” kind of boss. And, while Dan appreciated the sentiment, this wasn’t a conversation that anyone else in the office needed to be able to hear just yet. He sat down again in the guest chair in front of Pete’s desk and licked his lips.

“This must be quite the development,” Pete said, sounding both amused and intrigued at the same time.

“You have no idea.” Dan squeezed his hands into fists, released them, and told Pete exactly what Meta had told him. That there were a small number of people running around in the world who were functionally immortal, who could suffer near-fatal injuries and heal in a matter of seconds or minutes, and who could come back from death itself with no permanent aftereffects.

By the time he finished, Pete’s mouth was hanging open. “You’re shitting me.”

“Just telling you what she told me. And also, it looks like that’s what happened to the CEO at Merrick. They escaped, and they killed him and his bodyguards on the way out the door.”

Pete took a couple of deep breaths and massaged his temples. “That’s . . . that’s bizarre. And really interesting, if it’s even halfway close to being true.”

“I could get Kenny Shelton on the job,” Dan offered. “He could find them easy, no problem.”

Pete nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “But right now . . . Dan, even if this is real, these people sound like they’re hard to get hold of, dangerous to have around, and not really inclined to be cooperative. And that’s to say nothing of the absolute fit the press would throw if they got wind of this. I’ll keep this in mind, but for right now, let’s keep talking to the doc about better drugs.”

Dan rose to his feet. “Sure thing.”

Really, it was the best that he could have expected out of Pete. And it did sound like Pete was open to his getting in touch with Meta again, and that was what really mattered at the moment.

The conversation might have ended that day in Pete Francis’s office, and no one would have been the wiser. But, a month later, two things happened that changed the situation entirely. The first was the scheduled execution of an offender named Otoniel Flores. Mr. Flores’s passage from this earth had been delayed several times by appeals that cited his mental illness and a physical disability and disparaged the training and skills of his public defender. Dan wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, but the fact remained that Flores had left a fourteen-year-old girl dead in a drug-fueled altercation, and, as far as Dan was concerned, he had given up his right to exist in that moment.

After years of legal wrangling, the courts had come down in support of Dan’s assessment of the situation, and Otoniel Flores was transported to the death house in Huntsville to be escorted from this mortal coil. The day of Flores’s execution was nerve-wracking for everyone, including Flores himself. Protestors gathered outside the prison at dawn, making a racket and delaying the arrival of several key personnel, including a chaplain and one of the executioner’s assistants. There was a further delay in inserting the IV needles into Flores’s arms, as his veins were scarred from years of drug abuse.

Finally, it turned out that the Pentobarbital used on Flores was several years old, the last of the old Merrick supply. The warden at the Walls Unit had been advised that the contract with Merrick Pharmaceuticals had been renewed, and more Pentobarbital could be ordered, but conflicting advice from another department induced him to finish the old supply before spending scarce state money to order new drugs. The Pentobarbital had not been stored well, and it had deteriorated. Flores howled in pain as he died, and one witness was seen rushing to a bathroom to throw up as soon as the execution was complete.

The ensuing press frenzy around the execution led to the introduction of several new bills to the Legislature that threatened the future of capital punishment in Texas. In response, Pete Francis arranged a Zoom meeting between the Administrative Review division and Dr. Meta Kozak. She appeared on the Zoom call as professionally put-together as she had been at the conference in Switzerland, and Dan had to smile a little bit, remembering what she actually looked like underneath her dowdy skirt and blouse, her lab coat, and her updo.

Meta chided the Texans for not ordering more Pentobarbital, but promised that she would send their next order by the fastest shipping method she could find, even if that method was an actual courier.

Pete Francis nodded. “I thank you for that, ma’am, but we might have a larger problem on our hands at the moment.”

The Legislature had had a contentious session, and had come up with a compromise that, in classic fashion, satisfied no one. The anti-death-penalty activists were angry that the Legislature had not abolished capital punishment completely. Everyone else was annoyed that the Legislature had demanded a complete overhaul of Texas’s execution procedure; even the fact of lethal injection itself was not necessarily set in stone if a new and better execution method could be devised.

Meta listened as Pete explained the situation, and gave the little pursed-lips nod that Dan associated with middle school teachers. “We have several new surgical anesthetics and paralytics in development here at Merrick,” she said. “I am happy to keep you informed of my progress as we proceed with animal testing. We are hoping to certify some for use in animal euthanasia within the next year.”

“That’s kind of you, ma’am, and I do appreciate it.” Pete raised his head and met Dan’s eyes over their separate work laptops. They had already determined that, if it came down to this, Dan would be the one to make the request. Pete gave Dan an encouraging smile, but his eyes said, _don’t fuck this up_.

Dan took a deep breath. “Dr. Kozak, I suspect that our Legislature is going to want more stringent testing than animals can give us. They want to make absolutely sure that our new method will be fast, foolproof, and painless.”

“That will not be easy,” Meta said. “Any two of those, perhaps.”

“When we spoke, at the conference,” Dan ventured. “You mentioned certain . . . individuals. With special skills that might be of assistance in our unusual circumstances.”

“Ah.” Meta nodded.

“Any information you could give us regarding the whereabouts of these individuals would be much appreciated.”

Meta sighed. “It is frustrating. I have searched for them in all the ways I know how. It is as if they never existed.”

“Well, someone had to know where they were at some point,” Pete broke in. “I mean, you had them in your lab, right? Someone brought them to you.”

“Yes, a man named James Copley,” Meta said. “I met him several times, briefly. He used to work for one of the American security agencies. The FBI, maybe? Or the CSI? No, the CIA, that was it.”

Dan took a deep breath, unable to hold back the smile on his face. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s it! No way the CIA doesn’t know exactly where he is. I think Kenny has some contacts there. I’ll let him know, and he can track down this Copley character. If Copley found them once, he can do it again.”

Pete smiled broadly. “Sounds like it’s worth exploring, at least. Get Kenny on the job, and keep me updated.”

“The ones who will be most useful for your purposes are the Black woman, the Frenchman, and the two lovers,” Meta added. “I would be happy to work with any of them, but those four will best fill your needs.”

“Got it,” Pete said. “Dr. Kozak, thank you so much for this conversation. Let’s keep in touch as this goes along.”

Kenny Shelton, Texas Criminal Investigations Department, was skeptical about the concept of functional immortality, but he agreed to help Dan and Pete find the three immortals anyway. As he pointed out, they had been involved in a criminal action that had disrupted the ability of the State of Texas to carry out legally permitted death sentences, so the state was certainly justified in its pursuit of them. As for what the state intended to do with them once they were caught . . . well, that wasn’t entirely up to him, was it?

“You’re just discovering the whereabouts of a gang of criminals who murdered an innocent Englishman and caused significant disruption to the business that the state of Texas did with him,” Pete assured him. “You bring these individuals to us, Mr. Shelton, and then you can go home to your family and never spare another thought about it.”

Kenny nodded, and shook hands with Pete and Dan, and the deal was done.

Dan went back to his administrative work. He heard nothing from Kenny for nearly two weeks, until one day when Pete took a call in his office and closed the door. Dan figured that Kenny was on the other end of the line, and Pete didn’t want anyone else in the office getting curious.

As soon as Pete got off the phone with Kenny, he made a series of other phone calls, but wouldn’t let Dan sit in on them. “We think we’ve located the individuals,” he said. “We’ve got some ideas about how to obtain them, but we’re keeping it need-to-know only.”

“Got it.” Dan was enormously curious, but he knew better than to ask.

Whatever Pete’s plan was, it seemed to have worked. Dan’s phone went off at three o’clock in the morning a few days later. Karen grunted in annoyance on the other side of the bed as Dan sat up and turned his bedside lamp on. “Dan Wilcox,” he said.

“Dan, it’s Pete. Three out of four. There’s a little bit of business, and we have to wake up a judge, but we should be done in about an hour. How fast can you get down here?”

“Depends. Where’s here?”

Pete was silent for a moment. “Good question. Listen, how about you meet me at the Walls Unit in an hour and a half. We should be done with the judge by then.”

“Got it.” Dan ended the call and scrubbed his hand over his face.

“Honey?” Karen asked. “Who was that?”

“Pete. It’s a thing from work.” Dan swung his legs over to sit on the side of the bed.

“Do you have to go in now? They’re not executing anyone today, are they?”

Dan sighed. “I do have to go in. There’s no execution, but it’s confidential. Can’t tell you about it.”

“Will you be home for dinner?”

“I don’t know. Kiss the kids for me.” Dan wrapped himself in his bathrobe and went off to take a shower, hoping that it would wake him up enough to deal with the sight of immortal people.

Pete met him at the front door of the Walls Unit. He looked as though he hadn’t slept, which was probably the case. “Dan, good to see you,” he said. “Your guy Shelton was amazing. He picked up three of them in El Paso two days ago, and they’ve just been transported here.”

That news wiped the last remaining sleepiness from Dan’s mind. “Where are they?”

“I have them in the family area right now, under heavy guard,” Pete said. “Come on. Let’s go see what we’ve got.”

Dan followed Pete into the small cinder-block room where offenders were processed in on the day of execution. The three alleged immortals sat handcuffed in plastic chairs. The Italian and the Arab both looked up sharply when Dan and Pete entered the room, but they said nothing. The Black woman tried to leap to her feet, but two of the eight guards in the room pushed her back down into her chair.

“Is one of you in charge here?” she asked, her eyes flashing. “You can’t do this to us. We have done nothing wrong, and you have detained us illegally. I want a lawyer, right now. And I want lawyers for them, too.” She nodded at the two men.

“Sorry,” Pete said. “That’s been decided already. The court ruled, and you’re none of you eligible for legal representation.”

“That’s bullshit. If a spotted owl can get a lawyer, we can have one.”

Pete ignored her. “Her name is Nile Freeman, and she’s officially listed as killed in action by the Marines. According to their files, she’s actually a normal age. The other two, the only names anyone will give me are Joe and Nicky.” He pointed to indicate which one was which. “If their claims are correct, they’re pretty damn old.”

Dan nodded, and moved closer to inspect their new assets. Ever since Meta had told him about them, he had built them up in his mind, imagining rock-hard superheroes. Up close and personal, they were rather less impressive. Nile was pretty enough if you liked them tall and skinny. Joe and Nicky seemed completely unremarkable. Beneath Joe’s scruffy hair and beard, he did look like he occasionally saw the inside of a gym. Nicky was all angles, with a pencil neck and big green eyes that Karen would say were completely wasted on a man. All three of them wore grubby, nondescript shirts and jeans, and they looked dazed and exhausted after being transported all the way from El Paso.

Dan stood in front of Nicky, and snapped his fingers in Nicky’s face to get his attention. “You. Nicky, right? I’ve heard about you. Word is, you can heal from anything. Is that true?”

Nicky said nothing, but gave Dan a withering stare.

Pete sighed. “Looks like we’ll just have to see for ourselves.” He patted down the front of his blazer and dug in his pockets. “Damn. Forgot we can’t take much in here. Anybody got anything we can use for a test?”

It turned out that a few of the guards were carrying small snips used for cutting disposable restraints. Pete took a pair, clicked them a few times to see how strong their jaws were, and nodded to Dan. “You grab his head. I think his ear will work best.”

Nicky tried to squirm away as Dan approached him, but Dan had had far too much experience, back when Noah and Ashley had been toddlers, holding them still so that Karen could pull peas out of their ears and noses. He wrapped his arm around Nicky’s head and held his other hand under Nicky’s chin so that Nicky could neither move nor bite. Pete leaned over and took hold of Nicky’s ear, and positioned the restraint clipper over the cartilage. Dan leaned in close so that he could see what happened.

Joe and Nile cried out as Pete snipped into Nicky’s ear, about half an inch. Nicky jerked in Dan’s grip and tried to shake his head in pain, but Dan held him still. As Pete and Dan watched, the wound stopped bleeding and sealed itself completely in about forty seconds. Nicky stopped struggling, and Dan guessed that the pain had vanished. Pete took a tissue from a box on the check-in desk and wiped the blood away.

The ear looked as though nothing had happened. Pete twisted it this way and that, but there was no sign of a cut, not even a scar. “Well, I’ll be,” Pete said. “I guess that doctor really was telling the truth. Let’s see if it works on the other ones, too.”

Dan helped him to clip Joe’s ear and then Nile’s. Both of them healed as quickly and as completely as Nicky had. Satisfied with his work, Pete stood back and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Looks like we have exactly what we need.”

“Are we going to bring Dr. Kozak in on this?” Dan asked, ignoring a groan from either Joe or Nicky. “She’s been looking for them forever, you know. She could help us figure out how to do the testing we need.”

“Good idea. I’ll work with the numbers guys to get a line for a research assistant into our budget. You get her over her as fast as possible in the meantime.”

Dan glanced over at the immortals. “What’ll we do with them?”

Pete shrugged. “I put in a call to the Byrd Unit, and they’re sending down some basic bedding.”

Dan frowned in surprise. “You’re planning to house them all here? Can’t see the two guys going over well in gen pop, and this place isn’t set up to house females.”

“I was thinking the holding cells down by the chamber,” Pete said. “It’s not fancy, but we can at least keep them here for a few days, see how it goes.”

“If you think that’ll work.” _And if you think you can hide them from the press for that long_ , Dan did not add.

“We’ll make it work,” Pete replied. He nodded to the guards, who hauled the immortals to their feet. “Let’s get them showered and processed in. Dan, call London. We have serious work to do.”

Nile yelled something else about lawyers and her rights, but Dan and Pete ignored her as they hurried off to their next tasks.


	3. The Dull Thump Of The Knife

  1. **The Dull Thump Of The Knife**



Meta arrived in Houston two days later, and Dan had the honor of being the one to pick her up at the airport. She greeted him with a broad smile and a hug that was just barely professionally appropriate. The drive back to Huntsville took almost two hours, as they ran into traffic on the way, but Dan used the time to fill Meta in on their brand new immortal assets.

“We have three of them,” he said. “Joe and Nicky – I’m sorry, they just sound like such hippie slacker names – and Nile. Pete Francis got a judge to say that they don’t count as humans under the law, so we can do whatever we want with them. We’ve come up with some ideas.”

Meta nodded, pulled her briefcase onto her lap and opened it, and flipped through some binders packed inside. “Good. I have the written records from my previous work on Joe and Nicky. These are copies that you can keep. The originals are in a safe in London.”

Dan paused to swear at a bimbo in a Subaru who was only driving ten miles above the speed limit and then turned his attention back to Meta. “Did you get the briefing documents I sent you?”

“Yes, I read them on the plane. I am of course happy to assist with your procedures. All I ask is some time and a facility to conduct research of my own.”

“I think we can get Pete on board with that,” Dan assured her. “So the plan now is, I’ll drop you at your hotel so you can freshen up, and then I have to go over to Walls to get your credentials in order and make sure that we’re all set up for testing to begin tomorrow. After that, I can run your credentials over, and then . . . dinner?”

Meta smiled. “That sounds wonderful.”

Dan was already considering the oyster bar where Karen had taken him for his last birthday. They’d had some damn fine shrimp, and he thought it was only fair to introduce Meta to some real Gulf cooking.

Pete wanted time to go over Meta’s records on Joe and Nicky with the prison doctor, so Dan took an extra day to get the first experimental protocols into place and show Meta around the Walls Unit. She admired the classroom and gen pop housing facilities politely, and identified several spaces near the infirmary that she said would work for her independent research. Dan made a note of her choices and then led her to the death house. Meta took her time inspecting the execution chamber and the room off to the side that housed the lethal injection machine.

“The chamber isn’t real big, so I think it’s just going to be you, me, and Pete in here,” Dan said. “We’ll be taking notes about everything that happens. We’ve got a hand-picked tie-down team. You want the guy actually flipping the switch to have any particular expertise?”

Meta shook her head. “Just so the exact time is written down.”

“Got it. We’ll have the warden do it,” Dan said. “He’s responsible, and he knows how important this is for us.”

Meta went into the viewing room and sat down to look through the forms that Dan had mocked up for recording their observations and any interview responses they might elicit. Then she looked at the microphone used for final statements. “Can that be hooked up to a voice recorder?” she asked. “That would give us much useful data.”

Dan made a note of that. “It’s not set to record anything right now, but we can get that done today.”

“Good.” Meta checked one last thing off of her list. “Then I think we may begin tomorrow morning.”

Pete, Dan, Meta, the warden, and the tie-down team assembled in the execution suite just before nine o’clock the next morning. Pete gave the first instructions of the day, ordering the tie-down team to weigh each of the immortals. Once that task had been accomplished, Meta and the warden calculated the dosage of Pentobarbital for each of them. Pete wrote down the immortals’ names on slips of paper, folded them, and put them into a key bowl from the metal detector, and offered Meta the honor of choosing. Meta closed her eyes and picked up a slip. By this procedure, they determined that they would use Joe first, followed by Nicky, and then Nile. The warden went to load the lethal injection machine with Joe’s dosage of Pentobarbital, and Pete sent the tie-down team to fetch him.

The holding cells were only a short walk away from the execution chamber, and the tie-down team returned quickly, shepherding Joe, who had been put in hand and leg chains over his white prison scrubs. His hair was a tousled mess, and his gaze darted around as he tried to make sense of where he was and what was happening to him. After a moment, Joe seemed to notice Meta. He focused his gaze on her, and his eyes narrowed.

Dan decided to ignore that. “Joe, thank you for coming,” he said, hoping that the formality could break a little bit of the tension in the room. “I’m Dan Wilcox, a member of the Administrative Review Board of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. This is my boss, Pete Francis, and Tom Salinger, the warden of the Huntsville Unit. I gather that you’ve already met Dr. Meta Kozak.”

“An honor to see you again,” Meta said.

Joe spat in her general direction, although he didn’t seem to have enough moisture in his mouth to make it much of a threat. Nevertheless, Dan made a mental note to make sure that the immortals had enough water. There was no sense in letting them get too dehydrated for the experiments to work.

“Get him on the gurney,” Pete ordered.

The tie-down team lifted Joe onto the execution gurney, secured his body, arms, and legs, and attached heart monitor pads. Dan had observed this process several times before, and consulted his notes.

“On behalf of the Department of Criminal Justice, I’d like to thank you for assisting us today,” he said. “You’re going to help us perform some tests so that we can improve our procedures for legal execution of condemned prisoners.”

“No,” Joe snarled.

Dan let that slide. Joe’s consent was immaterial. “We have been charged by the Texas State Legislature to devise a method of execution that is swift, foolproof, and as painless as possible,” he told Joe. “What we’re doing today is taking a baseline measurement. You’ll undergo our current lethal injection protocol, while we monitor your vital signs. Afterwards, we’ll want a full and detailed report of your experience. Every detail will help us to craft a better protocol, so I ask you to be honest.”

“Honest?” Joe asked. “You want honest? Honest is this. If you let us go, right now, all three of us – ow!” Meta had inserted the first IV needle into the vein in Joe’s elbow. He turned the full force of his disdain on her. “We should have shot you when we had the chance.”

A small part of Dan had been hesitant to embark on this experiment, even after watching Nicky’s ear heal. There was something distasteful about killing people who had not technically received a judicial death sentence, even if they would just come back in a few minutes anyway. But Dan could not forgive such a sentiment about Meta, who was, after all, only working for the benefit of humanity, even those members of it who were as unworthy as the late, unlamented Otoniel Flores. Joe continued to talk, but Dan paid him no more attention.

Meta inserted the second IV and checked to make sure that the saline flow had started. The warden went into the next room, and Pete gave the signal to start the Pentobarbital. Joe turned his head to stare at his right arm, and pulled at his restraints a little. But, as Dan had seen before, the drug took effect quickly. Joe’s eyes closed, he gasped a few times, and then went limp. After a few minutes, his chest stopped moving up and down, and his heart monitor flatlined.

Normally, this was the point where a doctor would declare the offender dead, and the lines would be disconnected and the body removed. But today, the warden flushed the IV lines with saline again, and everyone waited silently to see what would happen. Roughly ninety seconds after the second saline drip started, the heart monitor registered a few weak blips. The blips got stronger and more regular, and thirty seconds after his heart had restarted, Joe came awake, gasping and coughing.

Pete let out a low whistle. “That was amazing,” he said. “That is truly a gift.” He brought the microphone close to Joe’s face. “All right, Joe. Tell us exactly what your physical sensation was during the procedure.”

Joe stared at him and said nothing.

Pete sighed. “You’re not helping yourself or your friends by keeping quiet,” he said. “We are going to continue the testing whether you talk or not. The only people you’re hurting here are future offenders, who will not have the benefit of whatever you tell us today.”

Joe remained silent.

“There is a viewing room on the other side of the glass,” Meta said, and there was a chill in her voice that Dan had not yet heard from her. “I am sure we can arrange for you to be present and looking through that glass as we conduct tests on Nile . . . and on Nicky.”

Joe thought about that for a few seconds. “Damn you,” he muttered. “This poison . . . it slows everything down. Your heart slows, and your breathing slows, until you cannot move your lungs to take in air. You suffocate, and as you suffocate, you begin to drown in your own fluids, and that _burns_. And there is _nothing_ that you can do to stop it. You can only hope that you lose consciousness before the burning starts. There. Is that enough for your ghoulish imaginations?”

Dan nodded. “I think that’s enough to go on. It’s certainly more of a review than we’ve ever had before.” He glanced at Pete and Meta. “I think we’re done with him now?”

“Yeah,” Pete said. He turned on the walkie-talkie to summon the tie-down team. “We’re finished with the first test,” he said. “You can escort him back to his cell.”

The tie-down team removed Joe from the execution chamber as efficiently as they had brought him. Pete and Dan and Meta changed the sheet on the gurney and attached a fresh IV setup to the lethal injection machine, and the warden loaded the machine with saline and the dosage indicated for Nicky.

Almost an hour later, they were reset and ready to go. Pete called the tie-down team again and instructed them to bring Nicky in.

Nicky took one step into the execution chamber and stopped cold in his tracks. He looked at the gurney with its fresh, plain white sheet, and looked at Meta. Then, without saying a word, he collapsed onto the floor. It wasn’t a common reaction, but it was one that Pete and Dan and the tie-down team had seen before, and they knew exactly what to do. The tie-down team loaded him onto the backboard stored near the door to the execution chamber and carried him to the gurney. Meta hurried to his side.

“He’s fine,” she reported. “No loss of consciousness.”

“Just being uncooperative?” Pete said. He chuckled a little. “My kids would do that sometimes, when they were little. Just go all limp when you told them to do something they didn’t want to do.”

Dan smiled. “Noah and Ashley did the opposite. They’d go stiff, like little dolls. Never did learn that it just made them easier to pick up and deal with.”

Meta inserted the IV needles, and Nicky flinched a little bit when she approached. Dan figured that he must be afraid of needles, which seemed strange for someone with Nicky’s abilities, but everyone had their quirks. In an effort to be kind and distract Nicky from the procedure, Dan started to explain the purpose of the test to him, but Nicky cut him off.

“I know what you are doing and what you want. Joe told us after you returned him. You will poison me, and then you will want to know how it feels to die.”

“In a nutshell, yes.” Dan was beginning to think that it might be worthwhile to sit the immortals down and make sure they understood the value of what the Department was doing. After all, you didn’t get to be . . . however old Nicky and Joe really were without knowing the good that scientific progress could do for humanity. But for now, he resigned himself to another few minutes of Nicky’s petulance.

Nicky closed his eyes and started to mutter to himself, words that sounded like they might be a prayer, although Dan was a Methodist and didn’t understand Latin or Italian or whatever language someone like Nicky might pray in. Again, Pete signaled the warden to start the Pentobarbital. Nicky’s arms jerked when the drug entered his body. His mouth opened and closed a few times, and then his body relaxed, and he died.

And then, a couple of minutes later, just as Joe had done, Nicky revived. He seemed to choke on something as he revived, turning his head to the side and coughing up a bit of fluid onto the pillow. Pete and Dan and Meta all immediately made notes to save the pillowcase for further testing. Meta wiped Nicky’s face with a tissue and immediately sealed it into a baggie.

“Welcome back,” Dan said, determined to be at least minimally polite to the immortals if it killed him. He switched the microphone on. “Tell us about your experience.”

Nicky swallowed and blinked a few times. The corners of his eyes glistened, although Dan could not tell if he was crying from emotional distress or if his eyes were just tearing up from the physical stress of revival. Nicky pressed his lips together for a moment before he spoke.

“The world pulled away from me, leaving me behind, and all alone, and as much as I wanted to grasp it and pull myself back, I could not. It dwindled away to nothing. And I waited for the gates of heaven to open and for the glory of God to reveal itself, and that did not happen, either. And then my chest hurt, and I could not breathe, and I opened my eyes on this room, and I knew that my time has not come, and I am still imprisoned here. That is my experience.”

Everyone was silent for a moment after Nicky finished speaking. Dan didn’t know where to look, and ended up staring down at his own shoes. Pete cleared his throat but didn’t say anything.

It was Meta who finally broke the awkward silence. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sure that we will be able to find a use for that information. If there are no more questions, I think we can send Nicky away and bring in the third one, yes?”

After Nicky was taken away, Dan and his group had the execution chamber set up and ready for Nile well before she arrived. Shortly after Pete sent the tie-down team to fetch her, there was a commotion from the cells. Even through heavy doors, Dan could hear shouting and banging. Even though he couldn’t quite make out any words, he was fairly sure that Nile was yelling nothing ladylike. Disturbed, Pete opened the door to the execution chamber and peered out into the corridor.

“Looks like she’s resisting,” he reported. “Nothing to worry about. They’ll get her in here one way or another.”

Sure enough, the tie-down team arrived a few minutes later dragging Nile, who was coughing through what looked like a full face of pepper spray. The tie-down team had her strapped to the gurney before she stopped coughing. Meta took another tissue and wiped the remaining spray off of Nile’s face. “This will compromise the data a little,” she said. “We want to minimize that.”

“The data?” Nile choked out. “Is that all you’re interested in? We are people, our lives are important.”

Pete shrugged. “According to the Walker County District Court, you’re not people. Your lives are very important to us, and we are doing exactly what we need to do with them.”

Meta moved in to get the IV lines inserted, and Dan drew Pete away into the corner. “Pete,” he said. “Are you . . . I mean, that was . . . Pete, are you okay? That didn’t sound like you at all.”

Pete squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She was just . . . I don’t like them mouthy. Maybe I’m just hungry. We’ll break for lunch after this.”

“That sounds like a plan.” Dan thought back to the schedule for the day. “This phase is going faster than I thought. Maybe this afternoon, before we try out the new batch of Merrick Pentobarbital, we can sit them down and explain the project in more detail. They were probably tired from traveling yesterday and didn’t really get it.”

“Yeah. Sure. We can do that.” Pete’s voice was dull, and he sounded tired. They would all need a break after this, Dan was sure.

Nile continued to protest right up until the moment the Pentobarbital hit her bloodstream. Her whole body twitched a few times, and her final breath came out with a gurgling noise. Then there was only the steady whine of the heart monitor indicating a flatline. “Never thought I’d enjoy that sound so much,” Dan offered, and Meta chuckled politely.

All too soon, Nile choked back to life, a little bit of foam dribbling from the corner of her mouth. “How can you do that to people?” she asked as soon as she could talk again. “It’s worse than waterboarding, and waterboarding is an actual war crime. How is this a legal thing to do to anyone?”

Pete ignored her and turned to Meta. “Doc, you have any preliminary thoughts?”

Meta consulted her notes. “Nicky and Nile both produced fluid, so I suspect pulmonary edema. It would be interesting to attempt a modified autopsy to confirm.”

“You mean cut us open right here?” Nile asked. “Is that what you did to Nicky and Joe back in that lab? Shit, no wonder they were acting weird after that.”

Dan bit back a sharp reply and glanced up at the clock. He had never been so relieved to see that it was lunchtime. “Okay, why don’t we all take lunch now?” he said. “We’ve got the preliminary tests out of the way, so we’ve at least got a baseline now.” He aimed a significant glare at Nile. “And it’ll give us all a chance to sit back and think about where we started and where we can go from here.”

Pete and Meta and the warden readily agreed to this suggestion, and Pete called the tie-down team to take Nile away. Dan stood still for a moment, torn between duty and desire. He really wanted to take Meta out of the unit and just sit down with her for a quiet lunch away from all the drugs and death and selfish immortals. But he also knew that their best chance for getting the whole messy job done as efficiently as possible was to make sure that the immortals understood their unique role in the grand scheme of things.

Without quite meaning to, Pete solved Dan’s dilemma for him. “Meta and I are going to the cafeteria,” he said. “We’re going to discuss the tests for this afternoon. Want to come?”

Dan shook his head. “As much as I’d love to join you, I think I’ve got three heads to knock some sense into.”

Pete laughed. “Good luck with that.”

Dan snorted, and the three of them left the execution chamber, making sure to close the door behind them as they went.


End file.
